Review/Art; A Tragic Harbinger of the New

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Published: November 13, 1992

ONE of the first paintings to be seen in the fine retrospective of Frederic Bazille opening today at the Brooklyn Museum is not especially fine. The stiffness of the figures in a copy of Veronese's "Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine" betrays the gropings of a young painter.

Still, as Bazille's only significant depiction of a religious subject, the work became an obvious gift when the artist's father wanted to thank the parish priest who had helped him recover his son's body from the battlefield at Beaune-la-Rolande. After the Franco-Prussian war began, and even though his father had arranged for him to avoid military service, Bazille enlisted with the notoriously dangerous Zouaves. "I'm sure not to get killed; I have too many things to do in this life," the artist wrote shortly before he was felled by two bullets in the stomach. He was 28 years old.

By then he had come a long way from the "Mystic Marriage," painted about six years earlier. This exhibition of nearly 50 paintings and drawings makes clear just how quickly and voraciously Bazille absorbed the examples of artists around him, and just how close he was to greatness when he died, in November 1870. Partly because he left behind no defining masterwork that would secure him an exalted place in history, he has understandably remained a peripheral figure within the extraordinary group that included Monet and Renoir. He appears most often in exhibitions about the roots of Impressionism, as a supporting player, the "what if?" of his generation.

The Brooklyn retrospective, organized by Elizabeth Easton, a curator at the museum, has been adapted from a show titled "Frederic Bazille et ses Amis Impressionistes," which this summer was at the Musee Fabre in Montpellier, the artist's hometown, in the South of France. It is impossible not to think about Bazille in relation to other painters. But a major benefit of the presentation here is that with only one work by another artist, a Renoir portrait of Bazille, Bazille becomes the center of attention, and one can sense the full measure of his talents.

Bazille was not only an idiosyncratic and gifted painter of landscape. He was also an intimist. The exhibition includes works like the "Young Woman With Lowered Eyes" as well as "The Fortune Teller," with its enigmatic and downcast portrait that prompts obvious comparison with Cezanne. The show also includes an especially touching depiction of Monet convalescing in bed. Monet and Bazille became friends while apprenticing in the Paris studio of Charles Gleyre in 1863, and during the next few years they traveled together, shared a studio near to where Delacroix's had been on the rue de Furstenberg, and worked side by side on trips to the country and coast. Both painted the same stretch of shore at Sainte-Adresse (Bazille's version is in the show). And when Monet undertook in 1865 what was at that point his most ambitious composition, his "Dejeuner sur l'herbe," he asked Bazille to pose for it.

While working on that painting in Chailly, Monet injured his leg and took to bed at the local inn, where Bazille, a former medical student, rigged up a contraption that dripped water onto the wound to help it heal. This is how Bazille represents him, sunken into the sheets and pillows, a gentle and tender figure, lovingly painted in muted shades of beige and brown. Bazille shows himself in this work to be remarkably deft at the arrangement of closely related tones and at conceiving the sort of subtle details that can make a painting glint like a diamond in light.

He lavished particular care on his depictions of men. "Fisherman With a Net" is one of his most striking paintings, an academic study of a male nude improbably set along the banks of the Lez river. There's a sensuality to this and other images of the male form entirely unlike his renditions of women.

Bazille learned not only from Monet but also from Corot, Courbet, Renoir and Delacroix, whose Orientalism he evokes often in his art. Bazille was not simply the proto-Impressionist he has sometimes been described as. He seems to have been just as interested in expanding upon realism as in developing the practice of open-air painting. He learned especially from Manet, whom he depicts, in one of the show's most memorable drawings, jauntily posed in top hat and stiff collar, a figure not unlike that of a bourgeois in Manet's "View of the Paris World's Fair."

Bazille approximates Manet's skill at painting velvety blacks and grays in "Still Life With Heron." And it was Manet's "Olympia," with its volatile combination of historical reference and contemporary subject, that must have served as a source for "La Toilette," one of Bazille's last major undertakings.

Bazille seems to have been searching at the end of his life for an art with one foot in the past and the other in the present, an art of modern life that aspired to the level of history painting. What he achieved was awkward, but compellingly so, as if he acknowledged the inherent contradiction of his task. There is, for example, the memorable strangeness of the large, late "Bathers," with its hard light and stagy grouping of athletic male figures, some of them derived from Old Master paintings, who ostensibly share the same space yet hardly relate to one another. Cezanne almost certainly was inspired by this work. But the strangeness and ambition of it above all can bring to mind Seurat, who was to accomplish in paintings like "Grande Jatte" what Bazille left undone.

The show is simply and intelligently installed by Ms. Easton in one of the lofty new galleries in the museum's renovated west wing. The absence of "The Family Gathering," which the Musee d'Orsay in Paris declined to lend, is unfortunate. But almost every other important work is on view and had the show been much bigger it would have seemed inflated, considering Bazille's real but inevitably incomplete accomplishments.

"Frederic Bazille: Prophet of Impressionism" remains at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, through Jan. 24. The show is supported by the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation. It will be at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis from Feb. 14 through April 25. ILS>Photos: Detail of Frederic Bazille's "Black Woman With Peonies," 1870. (pg. C1); A detail from Bazille's "Summer Scene (Bathers)," 1869. (The Brooklyn Museum) (pg. C30)